India’s problem is to find jobs for 10-12 million new workers every year: LinkedIn India

Linkedin set up its first sales office in India in 2009 and had over 3 million members then. Since then, it has grown rapidly to touch 37 million members today.Malini Goyal | ET Bureau | September 04, 2016, 14:53 IST

Akshay Kothari, 30, moved to India from Silicon Valley early this year as country manager of LinkedIn India. The last and only time Kothari worked in India was in 2006 as a summer intern with Infosys Technologies in Bengaluru.

Over the last decade, a lot has changed. The professional network platform set up its first sales office in India in 2009 and had over 3 million members then. Since then, it has grown rapidly to touch 37 million members today, the second highest in the world after the US.

The company has set up a product development centre in Bengaluru, the only one outside of the US. Kothari, an alumnus of Stanford University and Purdue University, has mostly lived and worked in the US with a brief entrepreneurial stint, developing an award-winning news app called Pulse that was acquired by LinkedIn in 2013 for $90 million. In an interview with ET, he shares his perspective on LinkedIn India, pilots in the works and India’s startup ecosystem. Edited excerpts:

What’s one interesting thing about India’s job market?One thing that stands out is that India is an active job seeker market. We did a closed group workshop where we asked ‘how many of them had a dream job’. All hands went up. Then we asked ‘how many are actively looking for a job’. Again all hands went up. I think this is a lot cultural as well.

What are the latest signals LinkedIn is picking up from the job market?Hiring sentiment continues to be on an upward curve. But there is a gap between hiring volume (which has risen) and hiring budget (which has dipped).

This has made employee referrals and retention top priorities for talent leaders this year. Currently, only 5% of the leaders look at internal hiring as a priority. It is essential for them to formalise the internal hiring process.

How different are your top two markets — the US and India?We have 130 million plus members in the US. The candidates are more passive in the US. According to 2016 talent trends, India has 42% active talent, which is above the global average of 36%. India has a younger member base where students are a focus and time to hire is a bigger priority here. We see growth acceleration here. India is growing faster than the rest of the world.

How does India’s younger demography weigh in on your strategy here?India adds 10-12 million new workers to its workforce every year. The biggest problem India faces is to get them jobs. The crazy thing here is that when you talk to companies, they complain about not finding enough people with the right skills.

Skills learnt in college and the skills required the job market are different. LinkedIn can play an important role here. When I came here I travelled to colleges in smaller cities like Nashik, Meerut and Durgapur. The situation there is dire. Most students don’t know how to look for a job, make resumes and find out where new jobs are. There lack of access to information.

We can create an ecosystem that will make information accessible and help provide equal opportunities to students from smaller cities and towns. For example, if we can tell them about the jobs of the future and provide them course options that can equip and train them, it will help. This is where courses from Lynda.com (which LinkedIn acquired for $1.5 billion in 2015) will be useful. This is the problem I am trying to solve as an Aspen Institute fellow in their First Movers programme.

How relevant is this globally?The student segment is one of the fastest growing demographic for us. A recent study conducted across Asia and the Pacific by LinkedIn revealed that fresh graduates and early professionals feel that it is now harder for them to land their first jobs, compared with two decades ago.

More than a third said they believe it will/did take them one to three months to land their first job. We are in very early innings of solving problems of college students and are investing a lot of time and energy in that space.

Tell us about some interesting India initiatives...We are focused on how to leverage our engineering team here to develop a great platform for India. We are doing pilots, some of which have been rolled out globally. Take, for example, our new product LinkedIn Placements.

Campus placement in India is unique. Here, once a graduate lands a job offer he/she cannot appear for another campus interview. In the US, you can apply to as many companies as you want.

The tough competition for jobs in India was a key factor in our decision to pilot LinkedIn Placements, a first step to help connect graduating students to their first jobs at a massive scale. We did the pilots last year and have now launched it. It is helping us understand the needs of young job seekers. We also need to do a better job of adapting to India.

For example, smoother loading of our sites when connectivity and speed are not so good. We have reduced the size of our app and are trying to see how it can work faster.

How critical is the India product development centre globally?Last quarter, we created a news channel in India where we curated best business news which showed up on every member’s feed. The news was curated from leading publications like The Times of India to what PM Narendra Modi was publishing on LinkedIn. Now that experiment is being ramped up in many countries. The holy grail for us is how to build a new product in India that is also globally relevant.

Coming from Silicon Valley, what’s your take on India’s startup ecosystem?India is still a young startup ecosystem compared with Stanford or San Francisco where you would so easily bump into entrepreneurs who have built billion dollar plus businesses, have been doing that for decades and can get advice from them.

The investor community also is much more mature there. As a startup hub, I think, Bengaluru has just finished an innings and is onto the second one. What gets me fired up is that startups here are now building products and solving India problems. They are on the path to building globally relevant products and companies here.